The Annecy International Animation Film Festival will honor French director Michel Gondry, Simpsons creator Matt Groening, and British animation artist Joanna Quinn with honorary Cristal awards for lifetime achievement. All three will be honored at this year’s event, which runs from June 8 to 14.
The trio represents three distinct styles of animation and three areas of the industry, from Groening’s global commercial success to Gondry’s avant-garde artistry to Quinn, an animator’s animator whose award-winning shorts have made her a legend in the field but who is largely unknown outside it.
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“For Michel Gondry and Matt Groening, we wanted to honor people who, for different reasons, couldn’t be honored in the main awards in the past, as we did with Terry Gilliam last year,” said Annecy artistic director Marcel Jean.
Groening will attend Annecy together with The Simpsons executive producer and showrunner Matt Selman and consulting producer/animator David Silverman, who will take part in an exclusive Simpsons screening event on June 10 followed by a Q&A session. Groening will receive his honorary Cristal later the same day.
Gondry, well-known for his hand-made stop-motion techniques, used in music videos for the likes of Björk, The White Stripes, and Daft Punk, and in his feature films, including The Science of Sleep, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, will attend Annecy for the first time to present his first fully-animated feature, Maya, Give Me Another Title on June 9.
The film, which premiered at the Berlin film festival in February, winning the children’s jury honor for best film, is a stop-motion collaboration between the director and his daughter Maya. Beginning when she was 4 and continuing for six years, his daughter would come up with titles for movie adventures, which Papa Gondry would use as the basis for a stop-motion short.
Quinn, in contrast, is an Annecy regular. The British animator brought her debut short, Girls Night Out, to the festival in 1987, winning multiple awards. Her short Dreams and Desires: Family Ties won both the jury and audience award in Annecy in 2006. Quinn was back in Annecy in 2021 with Affairs of the Art. A double Oscar nominee — for Famous Fred (1998) and Affairs of the Art (2022) — Quinn has also won 2 Emmys and 4 Baftas for her work.
“Joanna is familiar with Annecy, she’s been celebrated here in the past, but what we want to celebrate with Joanna is the importance of [gender] parity in the festival and in the animation industry,” said Jean, “10 years ago we had an all-women jury, probably the first major international
festival to do so [and] we want to celebrate that and put the emphasis of what happened since then…even if the evolution has been slow, its a bit like the tectonic plates, but compared to 10, 20 years ago, those tectonic plates have moved in the animation world and more and more women have the opportunity to work professionally.”
